Laptop Survey

[wolf184]

I am not sure if this is the best place to post this question or not. It involves the HMC40 but also Sony Vegas pro 9. I do not do a lot of editing in the field but there is the occasion when it arises, like being at the Climb to the Clouds event this weekend on Mt. Washington. I didn't get a lot of footage because I was there for the communications not as media. (Dang) Anyways my laptop is great but not great enough for the 720/60p video. As this is still kind of a hobby/business $$$ is limited....really limited. What is the minimum I could look for in a laptop that I could do a quick edit on from the hotel/motel. Maybe some of you would share what you are using for laptops...no Macbooks. Definitely out of the price range and have never used FCP/FCE. I attempted to through this on the timeline and had no luck with a render. Ran it through mediacoder and changed it to 720/30p, 5mbs, h264, aac, and an mp4 container to finally get this short video out...after 4 hours of head beating on the desk. Anyways looking forward to the feedback. FYI...I still had to go to the linux side of the laptop and edit in openshot. Couldn't figure that one out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPQckkrMlUU

 

[thabo]

One of these days I'll go to Pikes Peak but I missed it this year and supposedly they are paving most of the road by 2012. I run a Macbook but have been messing around with an older Lenovo and Premeire Pro 5.5. I too have an HMC40. In Premiere Pro you will most likely have transcode if you have a slower machine or one with a wimpy graphics card / processor. You are probably going to have to fork out at least a grand for a machine that you could use as a full time editing station BUT if you want to do a quick edit and not add color or anything you can use an older machine like my Lenovo with Premiere Pro 5.5 and not transcode. I have windows 7 enterprise, I wouldn't touch any older machine with vista and I'd try to get a graphics card that has at least 512mb of memory.

As far as Transcoding goes you have to either go with something like Cineform on PC side ($129). Encoding it to anything else like MP4 will just make it look crappy. All these cameras run AVCHD that is highly compressed and not designed to edit. If you want to edit it without transcoding you need a fast, new mac of windows machine with lots of memory and a nice 1gig graphics card, no getting around it really. That is why I'll still

try this one Lenovo Thinkpad W510